- 'A Laboratory of Sensations': Listening for Texture Seita, Sophie. 2023. 'A Laboratory of Sensations': Listening for Texture. OEI: Aural Poetics, 98-99, pp. 125-139. ISSN 1404-5095
- Playing with Knowledge: On Lecture Performances Seita, Sophie. 2022. Playing with Knowledge: On Lecture Performances. TDR/The Drama Review, 66(3), pp. 78-95. ISSN 1054-2043
- My Lazy Laboratory Seita, Sophie. 2021. My Lazy Laboratory. Rupert Journal, 1,
- Tom Raworth's Little Magazines: Outburst, Before Your Very Eyes!, and Infolio Seita, Sophie. 2017. Tom Raworth's Little Magazines: Outburst, Before Your Very Eyes!, and Infolio. Critical Quarterly, 59(2), pp. 11-33. ISSN 0011-1562
- Thinking the unprintable in contemporary post-digital publishing Seita, Sophie. 2017. Thinking the unprintable in contemporary post-digital publishing. Chicago Review, 60/61(4/1), pp. 175-194. ISSN 0009-3696
Sophie Seita
Sophie Seita works with language as a material across performance, video, sound, textiles, books, and installations.
Staff details
Position
Lecturer in Fine Art & History of Art, Department of Art (Studio Practice), Director of Critical Studies, BA Fine Art Extension
Department
s.seita (@gold.ac.uk)
Links
Goldsmiths Research Centres/Groups
Sophie Seita is a London-based artist and researcher whose practice is grounded in language and performance but swerves voraciously into other mediums, such as sound, video, textiles, drawing, and installation. Her work has been commissioned, supported, performed, and published internationally, by Akademie der Künste (Berlin); Ruta del Castor (Mexico City); the Roberts Institute of Art and Hunterian Museum Glasgow; Nottingham Contemporary; Grand Union (Birmingham); Mimosa House; Ma Bibliothèque; Queer Art Projects; Canada Council for the Arts; British Council; UP Projects; Literarisches Colloquium Berlin; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; JNU (New Delhi); the 87 Press; and others. Often working with others across disciplines, she’s expanding and deepening her ongoing intersectional queer collaboration with the musician and conductor Naomi Woo, to give voice to untold or speculative archives and research queer ecology, as part of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions.
Academic qualifications
- PhD 2016
- MPhil 2012
Teaching and supervision
I teach on the BA Fine Art & Art History in Studio Practice and on the BA Fine Art Extension Degree in Critical Studies; and supervise and examine projects on the PhD programme. I would be happy to hear from any graduate students wishing to work with me on projects related to my research interests.
Experimental pedagogy is at the heart of my work at Goldsmiths—my research and artistic practice develop out of and feed into it.
Research interests
Research Interests:
• Lecture-performances, poetic essays, video essays, and practice-based research
• Queer studies, trans studies, affect theory
• Disability studies, deaf studies, creative access; experimental captions and audio descriptions as new performative and poetic genres
• Speculative approaches to archives and history-writing; fictional collectives
• Concepts of play, difficulty, opacity, absurdity, ornamentation, deep listening
• Histories of experimentation and avant-garde group formation in visual art, poetry, performance, and independent publishing
• Theories and practices of translation and multilingualism across literatures, cultures, and borders
• Environmental research through community co-creation; queer and decolonial ecology
• Experimental pedagogy, alternative education projects/programmes
Creative curiosities:
opacity, playfulness, difficulty, artifice, queer abstraction, weird things, small things, minor genres, but also ornamentation, the decorative, the baroque, the exuberant, language bubbling over, mud, muddiness, swimming in it (in language, in language as excess), tactility, materiality beyond objects, the materiality of language, listening, listening beyond 'hearing', listening with the body, things falling in and out of place, being confused, being surprised, leaning into or revelling in ambiguity, ambivalence, silliness, when things or practices are joyously not-making-sense, non-linear narratives, provisional ideas, finding the complex in the simple and vice versa, archives (historical/material and imagined/immaterial), the allegorical body, the conceptual body
Publications and research outputs
Article
- Lessons of Decal (Language as Repertoire) Seita, Sophie. 2024. Lessons of Decal (Language as Repertoire). Performance Research, 29(1), pp. 66-69. ISSN 1352-8165
- RECORD AND REFLECT: A Questionnaire on (Video) Lectures Seita, Sophie. 2024. RECORD AND REFLECT: A Questionnaire on (Video) Lectures. Texte zur Kunst(136), pp. 96-97. ISSN 0940-9459
- Too good to be entirely true (A coda on the pleasure of archives and avant-garde publishing) Seita, Sophie. 2024. Too good to be entirely true (A coda on the pleasure of archives and avant-garde publishing). Textual Practice, 38(6), pp. 1012-1017. ISSN 0950-236X
Book
- Lessons of Decal Seita, Sophie. 2023. Lessons of Decal. London: the87press. ISBN 9781739393908
- Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital Seita, Sophie. 2019. Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503608719
Book Section
- Pearl & Theory Make Compost (2020) Seita, Sophie and Clayton, Kate. 2023. Pearl & Theory Make Compost (2020). In: , ed. EMERGENCY INDEX: AN ANNUAL DOCUMENT OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICE, VOL. 10. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse. ISBN 9781946604101
Conference or Workshop Item
- Listening to the Environment, from a Queer Perspective Seita, Sophie and Seda, Ergul. 2023. 'Listening to the Environment, from a Queer Perspective'. In: October Digbeth First Friday. Grand Union, Birmingham, United Kingdom 6 October 2023.
Edited Journal
- The Minutes Seita, Sophie and Ort-Dinoor, Yael, eds. 2022. The Minutes, The Minutes of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, 1 + 2.
Film/Video
- Turning Your Back On Seita, Sophie. 2024. Turning Your Back On.
Performance
- Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs) Seita, Sophie. 2023. Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs). In: "Mud: The Urgency of the Arts", Royal College of Art, United Kingdom, 30 March 2023.
- Reading the Rock Seita, Sophie. 2022. Reading the Rock. In: "Reading the Rock", Hoxton253, United Kingdom, 26 February 2022.
- Beethoven Was a Lesbian Seita, Sophie and Woo, Naomi. 2019. Beethoven Was a Lesbian. In: "Beethoven Was a Lesbian", Café Oto, United Kingdom, 2019-2023.
Professional Activity
- Artist in Residence at Brown University Seita, Sophie. 2024. Artist in Residence at Brown University.
- "A Score for Verbs (Unpacking my Performance Library)" Seita, Sophie. 2023. "A Score for Verbs (Unpacking my Performance Library)".
- Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste Berlin Seita, Sophie. Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste Berlin.
Project
- MY LITTLE ENLIGHTENMENT PLAYS Seita, Sophie. 2016-2019 MY LITTLE ENLIGHTENMENT PLAYS.
- The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions Seita, Sophie. 2020 – ongoing The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions.
Show/Exhibition
- Cloudiness Seita, Sophie. 2023. Cloudiness. In: "Crossing Borders", Millbank Tower, London, United Kingdom, 2 - 5 November 2023.
- bingenTV Seita, Sophie and Woo, Naomi. 2023. bingenTV. In: "bingenTV", Mimosa House, United Kingdom, 27 October – 8 December 2023.
- withwithwith Seita, Sophie. 2023. withwithwith. In: "Pretty Doomed", Ugly Duck, London, United Kingdom, 12 - 15 October 2023.
Other
- Listening Session: Seeing Through Flames: Hildegard’s Musical Garden Seita, Sophie; Ergul, Seda and Yount, Reylon. 2023. Listening Session: Seeing Through Flames: Hildegard’s Musical Garden. Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham.